By Chris Snellgrove | Published
More recently, the controversial Star Trek show Starfleet Academy finished its first season, and the online chatter about the show was endless. Defenders of this series always point that out because it has taken shows like this The Next Generation again Deep Space Nine time to achieve greatness, everyone must contribute Starfleet Academy some grace during its first shakedown trip. To this, critics always have a simple answer: that because the modern seasons are less than half what they used to be, the Star Trek shows can no longer waste time getting good.
That Starfleet Academy being renewed for Season 3 (Season 2 is already filming) could come down to a variety of factors, including streaming numbers and decisions from senior management. Lately though, it’s occurred to me that it would be easy for a future series to end up pleasing a diverse fandom. All you have to do is give Tawny Newsome a Star Trek spinoff a solid budget per episode and more episodes per season.
Office in Space?
If you don’t know, Lower Decks legend and Starfleet Academy writer Tawny Newsome is currently working on a Star Trek series that should serve as a workplace comedy. This untitled series is set on a vacation planet (not Risa, though). Apart from this and the fact that you want to set it in the 25th century (so, i Picard era), what we know about this show is that it involves helping a planet join the Federation. Oh, and the first pitch of the show involves unspoken shenanigans that somehow broadcast everything our Society crew does across the quadrant.
The series has yet to receive a green light from Paramount, and is reportedly already evolving (albeit in unknown ways) from the original pitch. Personally, I always thought “broadcast in all quadrants” meant they were making a version of Star Trek The office. Either way, Newsome’s workplace comedy show offers the perfect opportunity for NuTrek to go where it’s never gone before: 20+ episode seasons, with a very small budget per episode.
The Numbers Game
Back in the Golden Age of Star Trek, shows like this Voyager it had 26 annual episodes, and this provided a number of benefits to the writers. At the most basic level, they had an extended runway: with this many episodes per season, you can consolidate your main characters and give your side characters increased screen time. Most importantly, having so many episodes per season meant that Paramount could afford to have fewer stinkers; the poor quality of early TNG episodes like “Code of Honor,” for example, would eventually be surpassed by better episodes like “Conspiracy.”
However, the network can only do this due to cost. Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes cost about $1.3 million to produce, which was admittedly a pretty penny back in the day. Now, however, Star Trek: Discovery previously cost around $8 million per episode, and there are persistent rumors that each Starfleet Academy The episode costs $10 million. If that’s true, it costs about the same amount to produce one season of Starfleet Academy as does production three seasons of The Next Generation.
That’s bad enough, but three seasons The Next Generation add up to 78 episodes; Currently, one season of Starfleet Academy is only 10 episodes. That’s not enough time to develop all the characters, which is probably why Genesis didn’t have his episode like everyone else. Plus, short seasons lead to killer ratings: if, say, your four episodes stink (SFA’s biggest rating), then. 40 percent your whole season sucks. That’s enough to make fans sing and maybe seal the end of the show long before it gets good.
NuTrek Goes Old School
How does this fuzzy numbers game relate to Tawny Newsome’s Star Trek show? It’s simple: one of the main reasons we show that Starfleet Academy they are expensive because of all the high-end special effects needed for stories where the entire galaxy is at stake. The group is constantly traveling to new places (exploring strange new worlds and all that), meeting people from other countries (looking for a new life), and generally having adventures a lot it is expensive to bring life.
However, if Newsome’s comic show is really like Star Trek meets The officeit may be much cheaper to create. Characters can stay in a fixed location, turning almost every episode into a bottleneck episode. Citizens of the travel planet don’t have to have complicated makeup; in fact, the show could go back to the Grand Trek tradition of having only human aliens with a funny thing on their foreheads. Finally, the show doesn’t have to have legacy characters or other big names; instead, the cast can be made up of almost entirely unknown actors.
Put it all together, and you have a new Star Trek show that is very cheap to make Starfleet Academy. But I’m not suggesting that Paramount cut its overall budget; instead, the amount of money they would normally give to a NuTrek show should go towards creating seasons with at least 20 episodes. This will allow for greater character development and more revisions. Best of all, there will be a built-in grace period: even if the first five episodes of the show are terrible, fans will forgive that if the next 15 are solid Star Trek.
The Best of Both Worlds
In fact, I know this won’t happen for a number of reasons, including Alex Kurtzman’s inability to try anything new. But Paramount is currently considering whether or not to keep Kurtzman around, and the new leadership seems eager to get things right with the franchise. A low-budget Star Trek spinoff would be a return to the Golden Age, when classic episodes were created with killer writing and not a small mountain of VFX.
Done right, Tawny Newsome’s show (assuming it gets the green light) would be the best of both worlds: it would give NuTrek fans more of a show than they can handle while ultimately pleasing old-school fans. Also, it would give its biggest fans more episodes each season to stream, giving the series the luxury of games like this Voyager. But the only way this happened was if Paramount adopted an unusual wisdom about the budget for each episode: it made downNumber one!
